How to Achieve Your New Year’s Fitness Goals

With 2019 in full swing, it’s only natural to reflect on the last 12 months and start planning – if you haven’t already- for the next 12. New Year’s resolutions can get a bad rap as many people set out with good intentions, but quickly fall off the health and fitness bandwagon only weeks into their journey.

As Buckingham’s leading team of professional trainers, this blog provides our top tips for staying on course in 2019 to reaching your health and fitness goals:

Reflection

It’s always a good idea to sit back and reflect on the year you’ve had, pin down what you liked and didn’t like so you can consider what may be worth changing or doing differently in 2019. This way you can avoid repeating mistakes you have made previously, and it’s always healthy to have some gratitude and appreciate the year we’ve had before moving onto the next shiny New Year!

Vision

All great things that have been achieved have started with a vision. You need to make sure you have a clear vision of how you want to look, feel or be. To do this we need to take time away from any distractions and really build a strong and clear vision – it might be you walking down the beach with your husband in your favourite bikini feeling confident, or skiing down the slopes of the French alps keeping up with the kids, or even just how you’d feel being full of energy all day at work and being super focused and productive; which could land you the promotion you’ve been dreaming about. It could be anything, but it has to be something you can visualise.

Your Why

Understanding your Why will be one of the most important and powerful things you can do to keep you on track in 2019. Without truly knowing why you are dragging yourself to the gym on a dark cold winter evening after a long day at work, when you could be snuggled up on the sofa watching your favourite box set, the comfort to go home will outweigh the logic for going to the gym. Your Why could be setting an example of health for your kids, or you may reminisce on the physique/fitness level you once had. Neither of these examples may light a fire within you personally, but you need to ask yourself why you REALLY want to lose that weight or improve your health, or get fitter than you were. We’ve all witnessed someone who is super motivated after they’ve had a health scare, and that’s because they have a real strong Why behind their actions. Don’t worry if you don’t know your vision or your Why yet, it can come in time by asking yourself questions and digging a little deeper.

Fail to plan, plan to fail

Once we have a vision and know the why behind it, we can start to figure out how we are going to achieve it. This is where hiring help pays dividends. You can absolutely create a great plan on your own, but much like building a house, you’d probably want to hire help that has been there and done it dozens of times before.

It doesn’t need to be a grand master plan, laying out every step and calorie you must take for the next year. But it’s extremely important to know what is realistically required to achieve your goal, before making the emotional commitment.

You’ll want to have a clear understanding for the first 1-3 months of:

How often you need to train

Nutritional requirements

Hydration and/or supplemental needs

Recovery and sleep

5. Take action

As Nike say “Just Do It” and as simple as this may seem, sometimes we can plan until we’re blue in the face but without action, the plan remains just a plan. So we need to make sure we don’t get stuck with the ‘analysis paralysis’ stage by overthinking things and waiting for everything to align perfectly before making a change. The best laid plans, without any action, are just as good as having no plan at all. So let’s just do it…

6. Stay the course

Achieving great fitness results long-term is not a fairytale story of perfection. Eventually, you must draw a line in the sand and commit to continued effort in the right direction. Small deviations away from the course are no big deal, taking months off the bandwagon is a different story all together.

Along with planning in step 4, it is worth being honest about what obstacles you may face. For example, our members all book their personal training via a simple to use App, with an unrivalled timetable. This means that whatever their day throws at them, they are in complete control of their training schedule, can re-arrange sessions, and still progress towards their goals. Fewer people than ever are working a straight-forward 9-5. We’re working further and further away from home, constantly responding to phone calls and emails and managing family commitments on top of that, in modern adult life there will always be a reason to be too busy for the gym. It’s essential that you create an environment that is realistic to stick to and build momentum from there.

If you would like to speak to one of our team about how our personal training and private gym in Buckingham town centre can help you to achieve those fitness goals, please do not hesitate to contact us.